PORTAGE, MI -- With only a few days left before the start of the
new school year, teacher Sara Della-Coletta was busy setting up her kindergarten
classroom at Amberly Elementary School in Portage.

There
were bulletin boards to finish, a reading corner that needed to be
stocked and plastic dinosaurs to unpack, plus she was still
trying Thursday to familiarize herself with a new school building and a new
classroom.

Della-Coletta, who in recent years has taught first grade at Portage's Haverhill Elementary School, requested the job switch specifically because the district is
moving from half-day kindergarten to all-day. For years, the veteran educator has advocated for all-day kindergarten.

"It's seeing something come to fruition," she beamed of the change. "Oh, my gracious, oh, my soul, this is going to make a huge difference" for
students.

Portage is among six Kalamazoo-area schools
implementing full-day kindergarten this school year. Others are Mattawan,
Vicksburg, Comstock, Parchment and Schoolcraft.

That means every district in the region now has full-day kindergarten.

Six months ago, school officials at the six districts
were bemoaning the move to making full-day kindergarten the standard in
Michigan, saying they didn't have the money or, in some cases, the space
for the program expansion.

Now that the state has forced their hand, however, school officials are
expressing much more enthusiasm for the change -- and kindergarten
teachers, who have long lobbied for full-day kindergarten, are thrilled.

"It's so exciting, it's unbelievable," said Kathleen Williams, a
longtime kindergarten teacher at Mattawan Early Elementary School. "I'm
just as excited as I can be. What a great opportunity."

Funding change

Districts
are making the switch to all-day kindergarten because of a change in
state funding rules. Previously, districts received the same per-pupil
foundation allowance regardless of whether they had full- or half-day
kindergarten programs.

This spring, the Legislature changed the
law so that districts would receive only half of the foundation
allowance for a half-time kindergarten. School officials say the loss
of funding for keeping half-day kindergarten is more than the cost of expanding to a full day.

Portage, for instance, has said it would lose $2.7 million in revenue if the district kept half-day kindergarten.
By contrast, the net cost of implementing full-day kindergarten is $1.1
million, which includes savings from eliminating the mid-day
kindergarten bus run.

Steve Goss, assistant superintendent for finance in Vicksburg, said his
district will spend between $350,000 to $375,00 to implement full-day
kindergarten. But, he added, "we were facing a loss of approximately
$740,000 of state aid had we maintained a half-day program."

Todd Mora

Parchment and Comstock officials are particularly unhappy, because they
already had full-day programming in place but are now having to
change those programs to meet state funding standards, which is costing them more money.

What Parchment and Comstock have had in place were "wraparound" programs, in which children spent half a day in a traditional kindergarten class and the half in enrichment programming with an instructor who was not a certified teacher. The latter is less expensive because the instructors are not paid as much.

"Parents had a high-quality, educationally based all-day kindergarten experience prior to the law change," Comstock Superintendent Todd Mora said. "They were very happy with our K-Wrap program."

Kalamazoo Public Schools also uses "wraparound" at two of its elementary schools, Winchell and Indian Prairie.

Wraparound will continue at those two schools, which means Winchell and Indian Prairie will be the only two public elementaries in a six-country region that will not have traditional full-day kindergarten.

The reason: KPS funds full-day kindergarten with Title I funds, which
are federal monies to provide services for low-income students.

To
comply with Title I rules, KPS can't have full-day kindergarten in
Winchell or Indian Prairie -- even using other funds -- because too
few children in those buildings are from low-income families.

The only other option, KPS officials say, is coming up with $2.1 million in their general operating fund to cover the costs of full-day kindergarten.

Most of the cost of expanding to full-day kindergarten comes in the need for twice as many kindergarten teachers.

Of the 38 new teachers hired by Portage Public Schools for the 2012-13 school year, about half are new positions resulting from the kindergarten expansion, said Sarah Baker, the district spokeswoman.

However, that doesn't mean that half of the district's kindergarten teachers are new hires, Baker said. In some cases, veteran instructors such as Della-Coletta transferred to kindergarten, which means the new teachers are scattered across the elementary grades.

Derek Wheaton

In addition to hiring more staff, the other big issue for districts has been finding more classrooms. In recent years, both Portage and Mattawan officials have said that they couldn't implement full-day kindergarten because they lacked the space.

However, with the change in state law, both districts have said they were able to find the necessary classrooms.

At Mattawan, that means moving four second-grade classrooms from the Early Elementary School to the adjacent administration building, where the second-graders will occupy rooms that used to be computer labs.

To keep the kindergarten classrooms together at Mattawan Early Elementary, "we've had to move a lot of people," Principal Derek Wheaton said.

In all, Wheaton said, 23 classrooms were shifted around at the school, which enrolls more than 900 students.

"There was a day in July when where we brought in the football team and all the staff" to make the move, Wheaton said.

Looking at the upsides

Wheaton was among those who openly worried about the cost and space issues associated with full-day kindergarten.

But now that it's become a reality, he's talking up the positives, including the widespread support among parents and teachers.

In separate surveys of Mattawan and Portage kindergarten teachers and parents in the past year, about 75 percent of parents said they supported all-day kindergarten and the expansion also had the overwhelming support of faculty.

"We're most excited about the gift of time," said Cheryl Rodbard, a Mattawan kindergarten teacher. "More time to explore, more time for children to ask questions, more time for creative processing."

Williams agreed. With only a three-hour school day, she said, "there was a little bit of time to teach reading and a little bit of time to teach math. Now, there will be time to make more of a connection between the two."

Another big advantage for kindergarten teachers, they say, is that they will be dealing with one classroom of children versus two.

"There will be opportunities to make new connections" in a way that wasn't there wasn't time to before, Wheaton said.

Parents of incoming kindergartens say they appreciate the expansion to a full-day program for several reasons.

One is the growing appreciation of the importance of early-childhood education in regards to academic achievement.

"I think it's good," say Ron Vaughn, a Mattawan parent with a son starting kindergarten. "It gets them ready. Preschool now is like what I had for kindergarten. ... Having that extra half-day of kindergarten, I think they're going to be better off in the end."

For many families, there's also a practical advantage in full-day kindergarten: It prevents them from having to scramble for day care for the other half of the day.

"We're thankful (for all-day kindergarten) because I don't know what we'd do otherwise," said Amanda Marcelletti, mother of a Mattawan kindergartner.

Marcelletti said she had no doubts that her daughter will adjust to all-day kindergarten.

"She's been in day care since she was 11 weeks old," Marcelletti said. "She'll be fine."

In fact, all-day kindergarten is so popular among parents that Wheeler says it will provide an enrollment pop for the district this fall. As surrounding districts went to all-day kindergarten in recent years, he said, Mattawan was losing 30 to 40 kindergartners each year to those programs.

This year, he's expecting 345 kindergartners, up from 302 last year.

In fact, Portage and Mattawan said they are not offering parents the option of choosing a half-day program. One reason is lack of midday transportation. The other reason, officials say, is that officials from other districts have told them that even parents who think they want half-day kindergarten tend to make the switch to full-day by winter.

"We've gotten very positive feedback" on having full-day kindergarten, Baker said, adding, "I haven't gotten any phone calls at all" from parents upset about the change.

"The timing is good," Della-Coletta said about the expansion to all-day kindergarten. "You could even say it's overdue."